The seventh annual Madison Hip-Hop Awards recently took place, and co-founders Karen Reece and ShaH Evans discuss the burgeoning art form, educational initiatives using rap, and racism as it relates to access to venues for the genre - especially for local artists.

King Frederick the Great of Prussia was one of the great patrons of music, but in his early years he suffered for his art–and so did others. His father, Friedrich the First, was so steeped in military matters that he tried to squelch young Frederick’s fondness for the fine arts...

Here's what the label Universal Music, 2008, has to say about the release of the CD “The Sound Of The World” CD compiled by Charlie Gillett: " It is the consummate collection of what is happening now in World Music and what is about to happen, compiled by the most...

When it came to judging fellow composers Peter Tchaikovsky had strong opinions. He wrote to his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, on December 8, 1877: I attended Wagner’s Die Valkürye. It was a wonderful production. The orchestra was excellent. The singers did everything they could to make the best of the...

Moritz Hauptmann was a composer and music teacher with strong opinions about the works of his contemporaries. He was also a pianist capable of pulling off a little fraud when the occasion seemed to call for it. He was in Rome at a social gathering when he was asked to...

Twenty-one-year old Frédéric Chopin was discovering a galaxy of famous musicians of the day when he wrote to a friend back in Poland in December 1831: Paris is whatever you want it to be. You can entertain yourself, be bored, laugh, cry, do whatever you want and nobody notices you...

In December 1815 composer Giacomo Meyerbeer was in London visiting celebrated composers and performers. When it came to pianists, he was most impressed by a fellow German who had settled in London, Johann Baptiste Cramer. In his journal Meyerbeer wrote: Cramer is in his forties, a big, sturdy man with...

In 1943, at Lindy’s Restaurant in Manhattan, Marc Blitzstein introduced twenty-five-year-old Leonard Bernstein to twenty-nine-year-old Morton Gould. The two composers had plenty in common. For a time, their careers ran parallel courses and then they collided. Gould was well known in musical circles. His music was being played on the...

Anton Webern had chafed against the restraints of the conducting jobs he’d had, and yet, at the outbreak of World War I, the Austrian composer decided to work under even greater constraints--in the army. Yielding to family concerns about his poor eyesight, he trained to be a male nurse, and...

Ástor Piazzolla had gone a long way toward bringing the tango into the classical repertory and had written innovative classical music for the bandoneón, the concertina-like instrument popular in Argentine dance bands. It was 1959. Piazzolla was in San Juan, Puerto Rico, playing at the Club Flamboyan when he received...

Arthur Rubinstein was one of the twentieth century’s greatest pianists He didn’t begin speaking until he was three, but began playing the piano at age two, and so it’s reasonable to assume that the piano was his whole life. But an appearance on radio’s popular quiz show Information Please on...

Ted Gioia was in high school when he first visited a jazz club – The Lighthouse at Hermosa Beach – and he realized instantly, "This is it. This is what I've been looking for." It was the early 1970s. Gioia was a restless music student, bored by his rock band,...

Composer Jacques Offenbach had eight bars of a tune running through his head--a waltz that his mother had sung to him as a lullaby. Offenbach’s father overheard him humming it and told him that it was by a once-promising young composer named Zimmer, who had suddenly dropped out of sight...

The celebrated Austrian cellist Emanuel Feuermann didn’t care for recording, so he probably came into the Columbia session with a bad attitude, and the effort to make a record of Haydn’s Concerto in D went awry from the start. It was November 1935. The conductor was Malcolm Sargent who was...

As a winner of the prestigious Prix de Rome, young Claude Debussy earned the opportunity to further his musical development at the Villa Medici, but the honor was in some ways a setback. Before he even got to Rome, Debussy was homesick for Paris, and the villa’s vast view of...

Tango is a dance that has influences from European and African culture. The exact origins of tango—both the dance and the word itself—are lost in myth and unrecorded history. One plausible theory is that in the mid-1800s, enslaved Africans transported to Argentina would - with their descendants over time -...

Handel was having enough trouble as it was. When a competitor came to town, his situation could only get worse. In November 1721 his opera Arsace failed to attract London audiences, and its successor met a worse fate. After Floridante flopped, two operas by Handel’s new rival, Giovanni Battista Bononcini,...

He would later become known as one of the twentieth century’s great pianists and composers, but in 1897, at the age of twenty-four, Sergei Rachmaninoff jumped at the chance to be the assistant conductor to one Eugene Esposito in a new private opera company opened in Moscow by a tycoon...

At the court of Spain’s King Ferdinand V and Queen Maria Barbara, the famed Italian castrato Farinelli was such a royal favorite that he could have influenced Spain’s politics, but he preferred to make his mark on the country’s musical life–and that he did with a vengeance. As the director...